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Okay, look, I’m trying to keep low-key about this. I don’t want to make
it into a whole deal. But I just finished the first draft of my new
book, and OH MY GOD I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

I’ve been keeping my mouth shut about this, because from experience I know
the moment I say, “This book I’m working on is going quite well,” that’s
the first moment of a week of black, empty wordlessness. You just can’t
tempt the gods like that. So I have been very good. I haven’t said
anything to anybody, even though I have desperately wanted to grab someone
and yell, “It’s the best book ever! It’s the best book ever!”

Now I should confess that I often become overly enamored with my own books
while I’m writing them. It’s a good thing, because if I saw them
objectively, these staggering, newborn first drafts, I’d probably be so
appalled that I wouldn’t be able to keep working on them. Blind love at
this point is a prerequisite.

And next, I’m sure I’m going to read this draft and discover the myriad
ways in which it’s not as wonderful as I thought. But that’s also a good
thing: just as I can’t write if I’m in a critical frame of mind, I can’t
edit unless I am. So I need to change modes. I need to give it some
tough love.

But before I do, I’m just going to say it: this has been
the best writing experience of my life.

I did two things differently this time. First, I had a
daily maximum word limit. I
probably broke this more times than I honored it, but still, I
think it was helpful. It was good to feel a little naughty when I
wrote 800 words in a day. And it was good to be able to leave it at
200 words when the scene needed more thought, rather than feeling like
I should push on with whatever I had at the time.

The second thing I did differently was refuse to plot. Well, I’ve always
done that; this time I actively tried to destroy my own plotting. Whenever
I realized I’d figured out what was going to happen next, I changed my mind.
My goal was to avoid any kind of cruise mode, where I feel that the story is ticking
along nicely and I don’t want to screw anything up, so I just let things play
out.
This time I deliberately kept messing things up. Sometimes
that meant I spent most of my writing time looking out the window trying
to figure out what would happen instead. And by the time I got to the
ending, all I knew was that it couldn’t possibly be what I’d originally
imagined.

I’m sure this helped my characters, because I constantly looked to them for
the next step instead of trying to nudge them down my pre-determined
path. And although I have a bunch of stuff I need to go back and insert
to make the stuff I only thought up later work, I think the plot that
grew out of this chaos is actually pretty good.

But most of all: oh man, it was such cool fun. I’ve had the best time.

(Note:
I know somebody’s going to ask about timelines, so: at a guess, I’ll
be ready to show this to my editor in maybe 6-12 months. If he decides
he wants to publish it, then add about 12 months before it would appear
on the shelves. I know, I know. Sorry.)

I’m reading a succession of crappy books. Not deliberately. That would
be weird. It just turned out this way: dud after dud. Every time I
crack open a new one, I hope that I’m about to get that feeling:
that moment when I realize, “Ooh, this is good.” But: nope. Nothing.
I’ve even started abandoning books before the end,
which I never used to do no matter how bad they were. (Instead, I
would complain to Jen every night until I finished, stopping to point
out particularly egregious passages. She prefers the new method.)

So it’s a good time to remember that I have read some
good books recently. Of course, when
I say “recently,” I mean “since I last updated
my list of favorite reads,”
i.e. in the last three years.
But if I can assume that you care about
my opinion, and aren’t here just because you googled for lonelygirl15,
then maybe you’re interested in my recommendations.

Here are some books that, if you stopped by my house and said, “Got
anything good to read?”, I would loan to you. I mean, once we had gotten past
the screaming and “how did you get in here” stage.

Corpsing (Toby Litt):
This was the first book of Toby’s I ever read, and I
loved it so much that I keep buying more of his, even though
all of those have turned out to be terrible. For me, Toby is that guy
you know is trouble but can’t keep away from, because maybe this time
it will be different; maybe he’ll treat you right. He never does. He’s
a bad, bad man.

The Baroque Cycle:
Quicksilver,
The Confusion, and
The System of the World (Neal Stephenson):
I adored these. Almost everybody I’ve recommended
them to has given up about 150 pages into the first book, saying, “Why
the hell did you think I’d like that?” It’s inexplicable. I think
all three books are amazing. If I had tried to write something like this, it would
have taken me about 40 years. In fact, it would have taken me that long just
to type them out, because they’re about 900 pages each.

A
Certain Chemistry (Mil Millington):
The British do excruciating better than anybody. Reading this was like
having my fingernails pulled out, only with more laughing. When I’d
finished I felt like I had been beaten around the head, but with love.
Because
of this I’m putting it ahead of
Things
My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, which is also very good and
possibly funnier.

The
Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger):
This one is a rough ride, too. Some of it is astonishingly beautiful,
some is unbearably tragic. I thought it dragged a little in the middle,
but still loved it.

Astonishing X-Men (Joss Whedon):
I’ve been reading some comics lately, and this one is gorgeous. Book
3 (“Torn”) is especially juicy. Joss Whedon is, of course, one of the greatest
human beings to ever walk the Earth, and he’s in great form here.
I obsessively read X-Men comics in high school and college, and
it’s very cool to return to these characters and see them handled so well.

The Men Who Stare At Goats (Jon Ronson) [non-fiction]:
This book started out as a light, ridiculous, funny read, then turned dark
and disturbing. I love that.

The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse (Robert Rankin):
It’s funny and it’s clever, but more than that it has a surprising and
truly wonderful
dynamic between the two main characters. Warm, snuggly, and gooey (in
a good way).

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell (Susanna Clarke):
I don’t usually read the backs of books until I’ve finished them, but
I snuck a look at this one early and discovered that it was Time
Magazine’s Book of the Year (2004). I wish I hadn’t
done that, because from that point onward all I could think was,
“Well, it’s good, but is it Book of the Year good?” So try not
to do that. It is an absorbing read: simultaneously rich and dry.

Watching Racehorses: A Guide to Betting on Behaviour (Geoffrey Hutson) [non-fiction]:
I don’t care about racehorses. I have no interest in betting on them. I
only read this book because Geoff is a neighbor. But it was genuinely
fascinating, very funny, and worth it for the section on clitoral
winking alone. (I know. Intriguing.)

Haunted (Chuck Palahniuk):
This is a bunch of short stories with a novel wrapped around it.
As with any short story collection, the quality varies, but some of the
ones in here scared the absolute crap out of me. So even though I wouldn’t
rate this as Chuck’s best, it was a good read. Incidentally,
I read a review of this in The Washington Post that was more like
a drive-by shooting, with several bullets aimed below the belt,
and noticed that Amazon.com chose
that one, that one, to put on their site. It was nice to see that
that doesn’t just happen to me.

The Beach (Alex Garland):
Yeah, it’s already on my old list. But I re-read it,
and ohhh, it’s so good.

So lonelygirl15
turns out to be a fake. What looked like the intimate video diary of
a 16-year-old girl named Bree is actually “a new art form,”
courtesy of three L.A. filmmakers. And Bree is really a 19-year-old
actress from New Zealand named Jessica Rose.

Some of the thousands of fans who followed
her videos on YouTube
are upset. Some are angry—very angry. Some don’t see the problem. Some think the videos are more interesting now that they know they’re made up, and some feel like they lost a friend.

Me, I’m voting this a neat piece of marketing.

True, they’re not selling anything. That’s the good news: this didn’t turn
out to be an ad for acne cream or a movie. The creators
say:

We want you to know that we aren’t a big corporation. We are just like you. A few people who love good stories. We hope that you will join us in the continuing story of Lonelygirl15, and help us usher in an era of interactive storytelling where the line between “fan” and “star” has been removed, and dedicated fans like yourselves are paid for their efforts. This is an incredible time for the creator inside all of us.

It’s funny that people who created something so interesting could write something this dumb.

lonelygirl15 didn’t succeed because it told a compelling story. It succeeded because people thought it was real. Without the deception, there’s nothing special. The filmmakers knew this; they went to a lot of trouble to keep up the pretense, to the extent of posting personal replies, as Bree, to people who wrote in. They built fake relationships with fans. And now some of those fans feel like pauldonald:

the reason why im annoyed is because people are going to use this website to try to boost there acting career so now you cant trust anyone on youtube and i
do wish bree was real because i fell in love with the character. im not sure if i like jessica rose coz from the pics i have seen she seems like the total opposite of lonelygirl coz she seems like a easy party girl but even though this is fake im not mad at the person who made this even though it was a bit of a spit in the face.

This is what makes it marketing, not storytelling. Storytelling doesn’t abuse its audience. Without the bit at the start that says, “This is made up,” it’s not storytelling; it’s just lying.

Every fiction writer in history has probably been annoyed by how much more power a “true story” seems to have. But that’s the deal we make: we admit up front that our tale isn’t true, then we desperately try to make it as authentic as possible. Doing it the other way around—claiming to have a true story and filling it with fiction—that just pisses me off. Storytelling? A new art form? Give me a break. When you agree to the deal, then you can be storytellers. Until then, you’re marketers.

I recently discovered
Pandora, a web
site that acts like a radio station, only you’re calling in
all the time and saying whether you like or hate what they’re playing,
and the sweaty, desperate-to-please DJs rush to change
their playlist to keep you satisfied. I think you’ll agree
that the world would be a better place if more of it operated
on this kind of basis.

I’ve started using this while I’m writing: I fire up my web
browser, point it at Pandora, and let the tunes roll.
Not
only is it very good at serving up my kind of music,
but it also tells me what
kind of music that is: apparently I am big on synth bass
riffs, a highly synthetic sonority, repetitive song structure,
a tight kick sound, and prevalent use of groove. I don’t
even know that that means. But I like it.

Once you’ve trained up those sweaty virtual DJs, you can share
their work with other people. And that’s why I mention
it here: if you want to hear what I’m listening to while
writing, tune in here:

(Gahh! I wrote most of this blog, then got sick. It was
the usual. But I’m better now,
thanks for asking.)

Some people recommend that you write a certain number of words every day.
Well, not you, necessarily. Novelists. See, those of us who decided it was
a good idea to write a novel sometimes find that our key challenge has
become not drawing heart-breakingly realistic characters or identifying
our underlying unifying theme, but rather getting to the end of the
frickin’ thing before we die.

Novels are long. You probably don’t realize how long until you
write one. Occasionally I hear that someone read one of my books in
some ridiculous amount of time, like a single night, or half a day
while sipping coffee in Barnes & Noble, or while waiting in line at a movie,
and this is wonderful but also appalling, because people really shouldn’t
be allowed to digest a couple of years’ worth of my work that fast. They
should have to work at it, like I did. It’s only fair.

But the point is: if a writer isn’t careful (or if he is;
if he is too careful), he can find himself
with a reasonable amount of pages but no enthusiasm to write any more.

But for me, it’s a disaster. I tried it in 1998, after I’d finished
Syrup but before I’d found a publisher. I was starting
a book called Paper Warfare, a fairly straight corporate thriller
about tobacco marketing, and I was very disciplined;
every day for weeks I pounded out my minimum 2,000 words. But it felt
wrong, because I knew that some days I was just banging
out words so I could close the goddamn word processor and go do
something else. The next day, I’d try to avoid looking at the words,
because if I did I would be so appalled that I would have to delete
them. This didn’t seem very efficient. And, more importantly, I wasn’t
enjoying it: writing had become a chore.

I made it all the way to the book’s climax—I even had the ending
plotted out—then realized it sucked. Not just a little. Not
in ways that could be fixed. The whole book really, really blew.

Since then, I’ve written exactly as many words per day as I feel like.
And that’s worked well, because when I’m having fun, I’m usually producing
good words. But for the book I’m working on now, I’m
trying something new: a maximum number of words per day.

I had something like this when I wrote Syrup, because
I wrote during my lunch breaks at Hewlett-Packard: I had one hour to eat,
write, and get back to pretending that I knew what SCSI interfaces were.
Often I would be forced to leave half-way through a
great scene, even though I was chafing to finish it. During the rest of
those days I would keep thinking about the book, and come up with little embellishments
and new ideas. Next lunch time, I would cram down my chicken sandwiches so
I could get to writing as soon as possible.

I think this is pretty close to the perfect state: unable to write quite
as much as I want to. So I’m seeing if I can create it artificially.

So far it’s been hard, because when I’m on a roll, I really don’t want to
stop. I find myself deliberately avoiding doing a word count, because I
know I’m probably already over. (I have set my maximum low: just 500 words
per day.) Stopping before I want to is frustrating. But then, that’s the
idea. I should finish each day a little frustrated.

You will know if this technique is working, because my blogs will become
much longer, as I seek outlets for my pent-up words. Yes. You will be my
hookers.

I sleep in later than I mean to and have to shower, dress, and
pack so fast that I barely have enough time to steal a hotel pen.
I’m meeting my friend Charles for breakfast, and we decide to use
the hotel restaurant.
This turns out to be a mistake, as Charles manages to order the world’s most expensive
bagel, a whopping $18 because along with the juice and coffee it
qualifies as a “continental breakfast.”

Our plan is to walk to the Museum of Natural History, but it’s such
an extraordinarily sunny day that instead we end up just chatting on a bench
in Central Park. During this time I watch a lot of parents with
prams go by, and enjoy peering at their babies until I see one with beady
little eyes and a hairy face. It’s a miniature poodle. Yes. In a pram.

That afternoon I have lunch with my impossibly cool agent, Luke, in
the kind of restaurant where ladies come to complain to each other
about their nannies. (Seriously. I hear them.) I also meet Luke’s dad,
legendary agent Mort Janklow. This is a little nerve-wracking, because
if the stories I’ve heard are true, when Mort enters the room editors
fall to the ground and cry. But he seems quite normal; friendly, even.
I guess that’s how it works: the killer is never the one you expect.

I catch a ride out to JFK where I stand in the check-in line behind
a Hasidic Jew and a blonde woman dressed as a cowgirl. I
feel as if the Universe is trying to tell me something, but I’m
too stupid to understand the message.

It’s a little over six hours in the air to L.A., then I have a couple
hours on the ground before the 16-hour flight to Melbourne. The most
interesting thing about this is that we cross the International Date
Line at around midnight, so I miss Friday entirely. When it’s my time
to die, I want that day back.

This makes it Saturday when we touch down in Melbourne. I’ve taken
no more than ten steps off the plane when I hear someone saying,
“Yeah, they’d make Riewoldt captain in a second anywhere else.” They’re
talking about Aussie Rules Football. Ahhh. It’s good to be home.

I find myself walking quickly toward the baggage carousel—not just
places-to-be quick, but drug-mule-freaking-out quick, and force
myself to slow down. Of course, I know the odds are pretty high
that (a) despite our plan, Jen and Fin might not have made it to
their airport in time, and if they have, Fin may be
(b) asleep, (c) in a bad mood, or (d) cry when she sees this smelly,
unshaven man shuffling toward her. But I can’t help being so excited about
seeing them again that I have to use the bathroom. In retrospect,
I’m a little surprised I wasn’t stopped by customs agents and
internally searched.

Then I stand by the baggage carousel for an hour. It’s not just me:
the whole planeload of passengers waits and waits. Crappy Australian
baggage handlers! I just know they’re outside having a smoke break
or reading their union pamphlet on workers’ rights or something equally
insignificant. Actually, bags are coming down the conveyor belt, it’s
just that there are about a thousand people waiting for them. It seems
that a lot of planes have arrived at the same time.

I am seriously considering just leaving the terminal and worrying about
how to get my bag later when finally—finally!—it appears. I collect it
and, one security check later, am permitted to pass through the sliding
doors into the main terminal. There is a huge horde of people waiting outside
and I have no idea how I’m going to find Jen and Fin among them. Then I hear, “Max!”
I turn and there they are, three-deep in the crowd: my beautiful wife Jen and
Finlay in a sling on her chest. And then the most incredible thing happens, something
I could never, ever put in a story because it is too far-fetched to be
true: despite all these people and all this noise, Fin looks directly
at me and gives me a big, gummy smile.

It’s a choice between sleep and breakfast, and I go with sleep. I’m sorry
for writing about sleep so much; it’s just that
it has become very important to me.
I have realized that if I don’t sleep, I don’t do the things I need
to on this tour well—things like talking to people. So a lot
of my time is spent considering
when I will sleep, and where, and for how long.

I’m met at my hotel by Rachel, who is my publicist at Doubleday. Rachel
has been working for months at getting me reviewed, interviewed, and hosted all
over the country: basically she organizes everything, then I just turn up and take
all the glory. She is terrific, and great company as we are driven around
Manhattan in one of those tinted-window town cars. (It’s all tinted-window
town cars here; that and cabs and stretch limos.)
I ask her why there was no Chicago stop on this tour (which people keep asking
me about), and she tells me it’s because everyone at Doubleday hates Chicago. Okay,
no, not really. It’s actually something to do with the difficulty of booking enough media
to justify the stopover. Which I think is fair enough, given the publisher is
paying for all this. But I do let her know that if I don’t get any Midwest stopovers on my
next tour, people may hurt me.

First stop is WNYC radio. I’ve done enough radio interviews on this tour to be
quite comfortable about it, but here the corridor I have to walk down to reach
the sound booth is lined with posters of various celebrities with the tag line,
“I’m a listener.” I suddenly find myself confronted with the unnerving image of Sarah Jessica
Parker reclining at home with the radio on, thinking, “Who is this Australian jerk?”

Despite that distraction, the interview goes well and then it’s off for a
round of bookstore drop-ins. These are becoming defined for me by the
big titles currently out, especially Stephen King’s Cell, which is front
and center in practically every store I’ve visited. I hope that one day some struggling
midlist writer on book tour looks at enormous piles of my books and thinks enviously,
“That damn Max Barry! His new book is everywhere.”

One of the bookstores I visit is St. Mark’s, which I realize is the
first store in which I ever saw a copy of my own book. Let me tell you, this is one of
the most magical moments of becoming a published author. I’ll never
forget seeing Syrup sitting
on the shelves, as if it was a real book. Of course, if St. Mark’s held true
to the general trend, they probably never sold that copy. It was
probably returned to the publisher and pulped. But still. Magical, I tell you.

Next is a Barnes & Noble, and it’s memory lane again because it’s across from a park
where I once played with some squirrels. I know, I know: to Americans—or, indeed, to
residents of any country where there are squirrels—they are nasty little disease bags.
But I think they’re wonderful. I love the way they spring from place to place.
I could watch that for hours. In fact, I have, and taken photos.

When I swipe my hotel card to get back into my room, it flashes red at me. I go
back to the lobby and get a new card, and, when this produces no change, get
security up to fix it. The security guy tries the card, and it flashes red… and he turns the
handle, and it opens. Oh. I just assumed that red meant no go. Because this is a nice hotel,
the security guy says carefully, “I guess it must have started working again.”

I catch a cab to my reading and realize why there is so much honking of car horns
in New York: it’s all because of this one cabbie. He drives with one hand resting
on the horn, tooting everyone, even if they’re not doing anything special. He pre-emptively
toots people he thinks might be considering something. And if someone dares to
toot back, he goes nuts, firing off loud volleys of counter-toots.

My reading is at Rocky Sullivan’s, a pub, and it’s a full room even when
I arrive. Before we start, I decide to go around and hand out the
publisher-provided donuts, and I can see some people trying to figure out
if I am really me. Some clearly assume I’m not, but rather just some wacko
handing out donuts, then get embarrassed when they find out.

It’s a very fun reading, and knowing it’s my last one makes it a little
poignant, too. I manage to read the sentence “Elizabeth’s throat thickens”
without messing up for the first time on tour. At last! It’s a little
victory.

Then, all of a sudden, it’s over. I catch the subway back to my
hotel, get a little lost, and now here I am.
As much
as I’m looking forward to getting home, I’m also kind of sad this is over.
When I had
the idea to do this travel diary, I honestly thought I’d be writing about the completely
unglamorous job of trekking from city to city, visiting uninterested bookstores,
and hoping desperately for more than five people to turn up to a reading.
Instead it has been wildly more successful than I imagined. I can still hardly believe
how rock star the whole thing has become.

Thanks so much to everyone who turned out in L.A., Mountain View, Seattle, Portland,
and New York. You made this tour unforgettable for me.

Portland is a little kinky. I know this because people who live there keep telling me so.
When I check into my hotel, the glossy booklets feature not only local attractions and places
to eat but also the results of a nation-wide sex survey, which boasts
about just how much more sexually active than average are Oregonians.

This crosses my mind when my breakfast arrives via room service just as I exit the shower.
I’m naked except for a towel, and the usual procedure for this kind of situation
is for the hotel employee to keep her eyes demurely averted, set down the tray, then scuttle
out of the room. But this morning, the woman makes bright conversation, her eyes
flicking all over me. I start to worry that she is going to yank off my
towel and snap my buttocks with it. I am, after all, in Portland.

My media escort is Elizabeth, who has looked after me in Portland before. She drives me
to a local radio station where I have a good, chatty interview, then it’s off to Powell’s
and Borders for drop-in book signings. Elizabeth has copies of the local papers, the
Sunday Oregonian and the Portland Mercury, and both have great Company
reviews. This makes me happy.

Then, amazingly, I have six hours off. Elizabeth suggests that I go to the movies,
which is a very exciting idea: that’s another thing I haven’t done since Fin was born. I
end up seeing Good Night, and Good Luck, which is apparently what George Clooney
and Grant Heslov have been doing instead of producing the film version of Jennifer
Government. It’s very good… although, you know, not a film version of Jennifer
Government.

I spend a couple of hours wandering around downtown Portland, taking photos. It’s a
gorgeous city, and I keep putting away my camera only to take it out again ten seconds later
when I see yet another beautiful street. I would really like to bring Jen here one day.

That night, 70 people turn up at Powell’s for my reading—my biggest crowd yet! It’s a good event,
although for some reason I’m a little tongue-tied and stumble over the text
more times than usual.
When it’s time for book signings, the first woman in line gives me a quarter and
tries to convince me that it’s customary for people to tip authors at US book signings. Seriously. Not helping.

A guy in line thanks me for a blurb I wrote for his book, and for long seconds I have no
idea what he’s talking about. Then I realize he’s Paul Neilan and go totally fanboy, because Paul
wrote what has become my favorite novel,
Apathy
and Other Small Victories.
(It’s not published yet; when we’re closer to the release date I’m going to tell
you alllll about it. Oh yes I am.) I’ve never met an author I really admire before, so this is
a big moment for me. Everybody still waiting in line looks at me as if I have gone insane
while I gush on to Paul about how much I love his book.

Afterward, Paul, his girlfriend, and I go out for drinks, where I tell him all the
horrible things that usually happen when you have your first novel published, while
reassuring him that they probably won’t happen to him.
I get back to my hotel at 2 a.m. and call Jen. Unfortunately, after a string of good nights, Fin
is resisting bedtime, and I have to call back later. It’s almost 3 a.m. by the time
Jen and I finish talking, which gives me a grand total of two hours and 50 minutes sleep
before I have to get up and
catch a plane to New York. Surprisingly, I don’t feel as if I have been
beaten with hammers. Or at least, not very large ones.

I’m waiting at the airport gate when a trio of young businesspeople sit in the row ahead of me:
two men and a woman. For some reason I can’t stop looking at them, and become
obsessed with the way the men are using body language to assert themselves over the woman.
It is nothing obvious or deliberately cruel; they simply interrupt her more often, and engage each
other more supportively. Then one of the men, who is sitting across from her, rests his arms
out along the backs of the seats to either side of him and splays his knees, and I feel terribly
sad for this young businesswoman, who is wearing impossible heels and a dainty scarf around
her neck and now finds herself confronted with a well-pressed crotch if she wants to stay in the
conversation.

Continental Airlines is apparently unaware that human beings have legs.
Maybe I am expected to stash mine in the overhead compartment, because there
sure isn’t much chance
of squeezing them into the tiny gap between the rows of seats. I
finally work out a position that involves bending one leg at ninety degrees and
jamming the knee of the other into the seat in front of me. It’s
pretty uncomfortable, but then my legs lose circulation and it feels fine.

I sleep fitfully, and at one point a flight attendant wakes me up to ask if my seatbelt is
on, as we’ve hit a little turbulence. I tell him irritably, “Yes,” then realize
it’s not.

I get some more sleep, then realize the plane has landed. But not in any airport: we seem
to be on a road in the mountains somewhere. The Captain explains that we are conserving fuel
by using gravity to help us along, and sure enough the plane then rolls off the edge of the road,
which turns out to be a cliff, and free-falls several hundred feet before roaring up again
under its own power. About then I wake up.

Every time I visit the stretch of New Jersey between Manhattan and Newark, I’m surprised
that it still looks this way. I keep thinking that by now surely some mayor has
thought, “Man, this is just embarrassing. We really need to clean this up.” But
no: it’s still chemical plants and sludge farms as far as the eye can see.

I dump my
bags at my hotel and race off to catch a drink with Bill, my editor, and dinner with Todd, my first
literary agent. It feels good to walk along the streets of Manhattan. I like how everybody
walks so fast, clearly expecting you to do the same or get the hell out of the way.

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is my last reading! That feels a little strange. I’m somehow surprised that the tour is almost over

You wake up at LAX. You wake up at SFO. You wake up at Portland International Airport.
(Yeah, little Chuck Palahniuk reference for you there. I’m heading to his home town; it seemed appropriate.)

How late do I sleep? 10am, baby! Damn, that’s nice. I haven’t slept in like this since
Fin was born.

I don’t have anything scheduled today besides my Seattle reading, but my voice is a little
scratchy so I decide not to test it against the icy winds and torrential rain.
Instead I spend the day catching up on email and browsing the web.
I also get some laundry done via the hotel’s service, but then I forget about
tipping the guy who delivers it. Dammit! Now I feel guilty.

My reading tonight is at Elliot Bay Books, and I’m excited because when I was here in 2004, my
media escort told me that Elliot Bay was the #1 bookstore in Seattle, the place where all
the important authors read. Then she drove me to a different store, to do my reading.
Now, however, I have clearly entered the big league.

The bookstore has a great room set up with plenty of seating. Then dozens of
people arrive and fill these, so they need to unpack more chairs. This is terrific: I was told to expect lower numbers
since it’s a weekend reading, but we have 60 people! I chat to a few of them before
the event kicks off, and every single person points out that I was wrong to say in my
blog that Seattle broke the record for consecutive rainy days: in fact it only got close.
Clearly you don’t want to mess with Seattle residents when it comes to what’s what with rain.

The reading itself is awesome; in fact, the Q&A session is probably the best
of the tour so far, with great questions and a really fun feel.
At one point a guy starts a question with, “If anyone here hasn’t read the book, you
should probably block your ears, but…” and I threaten to brain him with a water pitcher
if he continues.

I sign books until the store closes at 10pm, during which I get to meet a guy who’s taken
the trouble to stick a barcode under his eye, Jennifer Government-style, and a couple
who have driven all the way from Vancouver, Canada. One of them, Milla, took
a few snaps during the reading,
so you can check me out in action.

On the way back to the hotel, Tina, my media escort, is ecstatic over how well the event went.
She fusses over me like a proud mother. If I had any hair, I am sure she
would be ruffling it.

I call home and speak to Jen, who is particularly pleased with the nice things I wrote about her in
a previous blog. Whenever Jen watches an award ceremony on TV where the winner tearfully thanks
his wife, Jen gets all mushy. Then she snuggles close to me and says, “When you win something,
you should thank me like that.”

I order a late dinner via room service, and, still feeling bad for forgetting to tip the laundry
guy earlier that day, massively overtip. There’s already a 20% gratuity added to the price
plus a $2 delivery charge, but I give the guy who brings it to my room three bucks as well.
I think this means I end up tipping more than the actual cost of the food. I definitely need more practice at this.

On Sunday morning I don’t get up until 11. Wow, it feels good even to type that. Let me do that
again. I don’t get up until 11. Ohhhhh yeah.

Today is very relaxed: I have nothing to do but travel. Outside it’s bucketing down rain (*gasp*),
but I brave this to wander up to the new
Seattle Central Library. (Warning: picture
appears to have had blue sky Photoshopped in.) This miracle of architecture looks like they
built a tall office tower, then someone sat on it. I like it a lot, especially the sloping floors.
I keep hoping that somebody will drop a pen and I’ll get to watch them chase it from one side of the
building to the other.

Before I leave for the airport I carefully go through my bag, because at the last airport
I got stung $25 for excess baggage. My problem is books: I am now carrying eight of them,
mostly gifts from (a) the generous or (b) other writers who want me to comment on their
manuscripts. I am tempted to ditch a couple, but know I will be haunted by their eager,
innocent faces. So I start cramming stuff into my carry-on.

I’m flying Alaska Airlines to Portland and am alarmed to see that the airplane has
propellers. Propellers! Not only that, but when I squeeze on board, I find myself positioned
in the exact spot that they would intersect should they both decide to detach from the wing
and go spinning into the fuselage. Although I guess if that happened,
my precise location probably wouldn’t matter much. I guess I’d be screwed
no matter where I was sitting.
This is seat 1D,
right at the front of the plane, and from here I can also see our captain, a woman
who for some reason I decide looks like a Tammy. I watch Tammy carefully, looking for
signs of tiredness or suicidal depression, until my staring causes the hairs on the back
of her neck to rise and she closes the cabin door.

The seats are tiny and, judging from the smell, the man beside me has a dead cat concealed on
his person. Fortunately it only takes about eight seconds to fly from Seattle to Portland.
I’m first off the plane, but I
have no idea where I’m going. I take a wrong turn after entering the
terminal, and when I turn around to backtrack I see a line of passengers blindly
following me. Ha! I want to laugh in their confused faces. Okay, not really.
I feel a little embarrassed.

I tip so much between the airport and my hotel room that I run out of dollar bills.
This may be developing into a psychological condition.

The phone rings. It’s pitch black and I panic, thinking, “How am I going to find the keyboard in the
dark?” Yes, it’s 3:50 a.m., and my brain is not working at all.

According to Jen, I sometimes run in my sleep. I must have been doing that, because somehow
I have managed to strain a hamstring in my sleep. I hobble into the bathroom and start wrestling
with the shower, which, in the manner of all US hotel showers, will only provide water
if you turn the tap while simultaneously yanking a plunger on the bath tap. (Why? Why!?)
Sometimes I find it’s possible to do this without getting a burp of cold water on the back of my head,
but today is not one of those days.

I haven’t had much sleep, but it was continuous and I feel much better than yesterday. And I have
a cool ride to the airport: a big black car with tinted windows, the kind that usually have screaming
girls beating on them and yelling, “I love you 50 Cent!” Inside there are drinks and snacks available
but, I am disappointed to see, no neatly laid out lines of cocaine.

At San Francisco Airport there are 50 people in a check-in line and nobody’s moving. I work out why:
all the electronic check-in machines are showing: “Easy Check-In is available from 4:45 a.m.
to 11:30 p.m.” Yep, they don’t start work this early. They must have a good union.

When the machines finally come up, there is some kind of system-wide error and everyone needs to get checked in
manually. This creates an interesting dynamic, because the airport staff want to stick to the process
of requiring us to all try checking in at the machines first,
but the passengers quickly realize it’s faster to skip straight to the line
to see a human. For a while there is lots of sneaking from the first line to the second,
and then a woman—a New Yorker, from her accent—tires of the charade and starts haranguing the
staff. “You think we like standing in line? You think we should stand here for fun?”
After that everyone is allowed to proceed directly to manual check-in.

Naturally the flight is delayed, so I sit by the gate for 90 minutes, thinking about how much extra
sleep I could have had. When we finally get on board, I don’t even try to wait for lift-off: I close
my eyes and let the warm, smooth arms of unconsciousness embrace me. I wake up a few times to the alarmed
looks of fellow passengers and the lingering echo of my own snoring, but boy, I just don’t care at all.

Seattle is freezing. My new media escort, Tina, tells me that the city recently broke the all-time
record for consecutive days of rain (27), but then some sunshine came along and messed it all up. I get
the impression that everybody is a little disappointed about this.

The reason I’m here so early is I have a reading at Amazon.com. These corporate events are different
from my usual readings, because most of the audience have never heard of me. But it’s a full room—about
50 people—and they can relate to Company’s story, so I get lots of laughs. I also sign a lot of books, because Amazon.com is giving them away free to attendees.

After that it’s bookstore drop-ins. The most remarkable thing about this is an advertisement I see on
the back of a bus, which says, “Avoid Accidental 911 Calls: Lock Your Keypad!” It has a picture
of a man with a cellphone in the back pocket of his pants, accidentally dialing 911 with his
buttocks. Let me say that again. He is dialing 911 with his butt. I wish my ass was that agile. Right
now, while I’m writing this blog, it could be making me a cup of coffee.

The other thing that surprises me is a group of young people in the middle of downtown
waving signs that sport words like “REPENT” and “HELL.” I occasionally see people like this back home,
but they tend to be old and clearly insane. These sign-wavers are clean-cut
teenagers, and I find this much spookier.

Back at the hotel I receive a package of new reviews from my publisher. Most are great, but
there is also my first bad one. I should have known this was coming, but things have been
so dream-like lately that instead it’s an ugly surprise. Even though it’s not completely horrible,
I pay way more attention to it than to the good ones, and have to force myself
to stop obsessing about it.

For dinner I’ve arranged to meet Greg, who’s an admin on NationStates. Greg and I have
been in almost constant electronic communication for the last two and a half years, but we’ve never
met before today. Unfortunately, when making this arrangement I forgot that I was in Seattle, because the
plan is for me to wait outside my hotel. It’s raining (of course) and, according
to my body’s internal thermometer, about minus one thousand degrees. By the time Greg arrives
I can no longer feel my toes.

Over dinner Greg helpfully offers to educate me about how tipping works: I simply take
15 - 20% of the meal cost and add $1 - $2 per drink that contains more than 2.9% alcoholic
content plus 50% of any discount provided by the barman and 1% for every Tuesday between now and
the next eclipse. I think that was it. After doing the sums, I have to explain to the barman
that he owes me a $4.50 tip… but in retrospect, maybe I miscalculated.

There is no reading tonight: that’s on Saturday. But I’m excited,
because it’s my first opportunity for a really long, continuous sleep.
Oh yeah. I’m in the fast lane, baby.

Well, I walked into that one. In theory, I should get seven
hours
sleep after my L.A. reading and be refreshed and ready for the big day
ahead.
But instead, I write my blog entry until two in the morning, then lie
in bed thinking about how cool my day was. When my alarm goes
off at 7 a.m., I’ve slept for about three hours, and that in
roughly half-hour blocks.

I feel so seedy that I think I’m going to lose my lunch, and a radio
station is due to call me in a few minutes for an interview.
I think seriously about what I should do
if I’m halfway through an answer and suddenly need to barf. My idea
is to say, “And another thing, Carl—”
then hang up. Hopefully everyone will think there’s been a technical
difficulty.

Luckily, this doesn’t prove necessary. But it’s not my best
interview; sometimes even I can’t work out what I’m trying to say.

LAX Airport has clearly put a lot of thought into how to best
design
seats that are impossible to sleep in.
But I’m so exhausted I manage to grab
20 minutes sleep by jamming my head against a pillar. I
sleep some more on the plane, but I’m on the aisle and get
woken by a woman who can’t last the 80-minute flight without
using the bathroom. Damn her tiny bladder!

In San Francisco I meet Frank, my media guide. Frank, I learn over
the course of the day, has done everything. I’m serious.
He’s written
a series of bestselling novels, he’s lived all over the world, he’s
in a rap band, he’s writing screenplays, he’s developing video game
ideas—there is no topic of conversation that doesn’t prompt some
amazing revelation from Frank. He makes me wonder what I’ve been doing
with my life.

Frank also puts very little store in the opinions of other
drivers, even
for a media escort. We spend most of the day visiting a series of
bookstores and radio stations
to a steady background of tooting horns and
people yelling, “Asshole!”

I get a couple hours’ downtime at the hotel,
where I lie in bed and try not to think about the fact that soon
a few dozen people will be staring at me.
I still feel a little queasy, and all I’ve eaten all day is
a muffin and a few pretzels. But I do get a little sleep, and on
the drive to Mountain View for my reading, the adrenalin
kicks in.
The closer we get, the more awake and ready for action I feel.

It looks like being another big crowd, and Books Inc have to break
out
extra seats.
Then even these run out! It’s standing room only again.

I decide to go to the bathroom before we start, only
to discover
that it is directly behind the podium. This means that the
assembled crowd
gets to watch me fumble with the men’s room door key.
When I come out again
it’s too weird to not say anything, so I announce, “Yes! Here at Books
Inc you get to watch authors go pee-pee!”

Then we get started, and it’s a blast. There are fewer people here than
in L.A., but they’re very vocal.
And they end up buying every copy of Company in the store,
which is something like 100 books. They also take all the
Syrups
and all but two of the Jennifer Governments. It’s incredible.

I love chatting to people while I sign their books, but
I feel bad that there’s such a long line, because some people are
waiting for up to 90 minutes. I just want to talk to everybody. It’s
such a thrill to hear how people found and enjoyed something I wrote;
I could do that all night.

I also get
to meet
Ellis! He is exactly as cool as
I always suspected.

I get back to the hotel at midnight. Then there’s the moment I’ve been
dreading:
I request a wakeup call for 3:50 a.m. Yes, that’s when I have to wake
up in
order to make my flight to Seattle tomorrow morning. Even I cannot
really believe it.

Now I’m hungry, so I tuck into a banana cake that one of my readers baked
for me and gave me at the reading. (Oh yes she did.)
The bookstore people seemed a little unsure about this, perhaps
wondering about the legal ramifications of having an author killed by
poison attack on their watch, but it smells pretty good to me. I call
Jen and tell her about my latest amazing event in between wolfing down
big chunks of banana cake. She’s almost as thrilled as I am.
Jen was with me when I visited San Francisco on book tour in 1999
and no-one showed up, so she knows what this means to me.

Fin is awake so I get to listen to her blowing bubbles. So sweet.
In Australia, it’s her 5-month birthday.

I’m very tempted to
fire up the laptop and write the day’s diary entry, even though I’m
already looking
at my second straight night of three hours’ sleep. But that would be
insane.
I come to my senses and instead hit the sack. I continue a newly-established
tradition: I turn out all the lights and use my camera’s tiny LCD
screen to play a 30-second video of Jen & Fin that I recorded before I left.
Jen is holding Fin and Fin is looking sleepy at first and then snuggly
and then she does a little smile and they are both utterly, unspeakably
beautiful.

I may be the only author in history to get more sleep on a book tour than usual. I get eight hours overnight, although when I wake at 7:30 a.m. my brain doesn’t seem to be working. For example, I look at a pair of tweezers in my bag and think, “Oh my God, I have tweezers, those are banned here!” I am confusing the United States with United Airlines.

I check my email and web site and am pleased to see no comments of the nature I feared, i.e. “Who gives a crap what you do all day? Spare us this rambling bullshit.” Excellent! So here’s some more.

After reading a funny and
eerily appropriate Dilbert,
I am driven by Jeff, my media escort, to a radio interview with “Marketplace Morning” on NPR. The host, Lisa, is kind and gentle
and helps me get through it pretty well. This is the kind of interview where I talk for 10 minutes
and they edit it down to three, which I love because it makes it sound as if I’m just constantly coming out
with smart things to say. I wish my whole life was like that.

Jeff takes me past some classic L.A. monuments: the Disney Concert Center (giant metal flower, very cool), some
cathedral with a carved door (not really sure what the fuss is about), and a playground with police tape all
around it. Although that last one is not intentional. Jeff is a cool guy and we chat about all kinds of things,
from the aggressiveness of Tasmanian Devils to David Hasselhoff. That is, the conversation ranges between those two
topics. I don’t mean that Tasmanian Devils are aggressive to David Hasselhoff. Although could you blame them?
I’m telling Jeff that David Hasselhoff is experiencing a bizarre resurgence in popularity in Australia, and
Jeff mentions—just happens to mention—that he, Jeff, was in “Knight Rider.” Knight Rider! The coolest TV show
of the 1980s! This is why I love L.A.; everyone has a filmography. Suddenly the car we’re driving doesn’t
seem so great any more. I want Jeff to drive me in Kitt.

The next five hours are a series of drop-ins, where I turn up at a bookstore and say, “Hi, I’m an author,
can I sign my own book?” They put AUTOGRAPHED COPY stickers on them. This can go either way: either the
bookstore people are quite pleased to meet me and ask questions about how my tour is going, or, as in one
store, the girl behind the counter is so utterly unimpressed that when Jeff says I’m an author, she doesn’t
even bother to look up from her computer. But word from the stores is that early sales are quite strong—one has
sold out all eight copies already—and that’s great news.

As we inch along freeways, it occurs to me that L.A.’s main industry isn’t film: it’s parking. Seriously,
the amount of thought, money, and effort everybody puts into parking here, I can’t believe it’s not a
billion-dollar industry. I also think L.A. needs some kind of mechanized freeway system, where as
you approach an on-ramp, metal claws grab your car’s undercarriage and slot you into a perfectly-measured
space on a conveyor-belt-like freeway. Then everyone gets hauled along at 90 miles per hour until
you want to get off, at which point the machine spits you out an off-ramp and you regain control over
your car. It’s good to know that if this novels thing doesn’t work out,
I can fall back on urban planning.

For lunch I have a beef burrito at Farmer’s Market. I’m not very familiar with burritos, but from my
observations they seem to bear a fairly loose relationship to beef. It seems more like a “beef” burrito
than a beef burrito, if you get my drift.

The burrito goes down okay, but fights back when I drop in to see Brian, my film agent. I have to
try to contain alarming burrito burps as I’m escorted through the hallowed halls of CAA, the world’s most feared talent agency.
The thing that really amazes me about
CAA is that it’s full of hot 20-year olds. Every assistant or secretary in the building
is 20 and incredibly good-looking. I swear, the last time I visited, Brian’s assistant was so beautiful that
I went temporarily blind. Now he has a guy, Alex, and look, I don’t want to get all Brokeback Mountain
on you, but slap a cowboy hat on us both and who knows what could happen. But anyway, yes, barely pubescent
assistants everywhere. There must be a giant incinerator out back where they throw
them on their 25th birthday.

Brian has good news about both Jennifer Government and Company! Things seem to be developing
on both counts. There has been a holdup with the Jennifer Government script development, but Section 8
is still very keen on the material and there could be an opportunity for me to get more involved.

On the way back to the hotel, Jeff says, “There goes James Woods,” but by the time I
turn around all I’m looking at is his car’s tail lights. Still, a brush with celebrity! I make a mental
note to bring this up later, to impress friends.

At the hotel I am stunned at how clean my room is. I left the place looking like downtown Baghdad and now
it’s immaculate. All the crap I had strewn from one end of the bathroom bench top to the other is now
arranged in a neat 3x4 grid. I’m so impressed I take a photo. They’ve also somehow lugged the giant table
that I practically had a hernia moving over to the LAN port back to its original position. Those maids may
look small, but boy, I’m sure not going to mess with them.

I practice the section I’ve chosen to read tonight, then
Jeff picks me up to take me to BookSoup. I’m amazed:
the place is already almost full. And people just keep coming in. By the time we start, it’s standing room
only. Soon people are having trouble even getting into the store.

The event is simply awesome. BookSoup has donuts for everybody, it’s packed out, I’m excited, and
everyone laughs in the right places. At the end, a huge line forms and I’m signing books for the next
hour. I’m flabbergasted; the last time I was here about 15 people showed up. People have driven in from as far
away as Las Vegas, and many of them want photos with me, as if I’m a rock star. What I’m feeling is part
amazement and part pathetic gratitude.

As if this wasn’t already one of the best days of my life, the Fortress guys come over and say they
adore my Syrup script. I mean, they rave about it. They were only lukewarm on the first draft,
so this is a huge, unexpected thrill. We go out for drinks and they talk about all the people they want
to take the script to and I have a sudden moment when I realize where I am and what I’m doing and it’s
so absurd I could laugh. I am having a ridiculously good day.

I get home at midnight and immediately call Jen. She’s thrilled, and hearing her voice makes the day complete.

I should sleep—tomorrow’s a very busy day that starts early—but I want to get this written down tonight.
Thanks so much to everyone today. Wow. Thank you. Wow.

“Going anywhere exotic?” says the guy in the blue shirt. I’m startled because I have big weepy eyes and tear-stained cheeks and surely nobody talks to someone who looks like that. Yeah, so I’m a marshmallow. I’ve just said good-bye to my wife and baby girl and all I can think about is the way Fin’s little fingers curled around mine as she lay in her car seat. I haven’t spent single a day apart from her since she was born in August, and now I’ll be out of her life for eleven of them.

“L.A.,” I say. I’m leaving it up to him to judge whether L.A. is exotic. Under normal circumstances I’d grant that, but since we’re standing in line to check-in for a flight to… yes, Los Angeles, it’s kind of a weird question.

But talking to Blue Shirt makes me feel better. So does going through Australian Customs, because they’ve opened some barriers to allow you to short-circuit the enormous queue maze, only some passengers haven’t noticed, and they’re going back and forth, back and forth. This is amusing to watch.

In line I observe that the outgoing declaration form has a big notice saying “MAKE SURE TO COMPLETE BOTH SIDES OF THIS FORM,” but only on the back. I wonder how big a problem that can really be, people filling out just the backs of forms.

I have more than an hour to kill before departure, so I browse through the airport bookstore. A couple wander past me, talking in French. They sound very cool until the woman says, “<francais francais francais> Da Vinci Code.”

I buy an amusing-looking book called HOW TO RULE THE WORLD, even though I already have three books in my bag and know I will collect more on tour. In ten days I will probably be trying to figure out how to get my excess baggage home. At the bookstore counter I see the new John Grisham paperback; it’s called THE BROKER and the tag line is: “He broke the rules, now he must pay the price.” The Broker: he broke things? Worst. Tagline. Ever.

After an hour waiting by the gate, the Captain wanders out and declares that they can’t start one of the engines, so we won’t be going anywhere for a while. Seriously. We all take him at his word because he’s wearing a natty uniform. The Captain tells us how they’re going to steal a part from another plane to get us in the air, and the plane we steal from will get a part from a plane in Sydney, and… eventually, I guess, all the planes will be in the air except for one, and its Captain will be shaking his fist and swearing. Anyway, apparently this part can be fitted to our plane within the hour. One of the passengers says, “Take your time!” This gets a laugh, so he says it again, louder. Then he sits down, to, I hope, think long and hard about what he’s done.

An hour passes. I feel tired and bored. An announcement informs us that the part has been fitted, but now the plane is too hot from sitting out in the sun, so there will be a delay while they run the air conditioning. This strikes me as the kind of thing that could have been done simultaneously with fitting the engine part, but of course I’m not an aeronautical engineer.

A guy sitting in my eye line is wearing one of those inflatable pillows. Look, okay, if you’re on a plane, I guess the extra comfort is worth looking that stupid. But we’re still at the gate. He’s wearing an inflatable pillow at the gate.

It’s not a good sign that I’m this irritable this early.

We get underway two hours late. There are babies all around me, but for some reason I find them calming. I like that I can predict that the baby that’s making little crow-like caws in the back of his throat is about to go to sleep, and sure enough, he does. When the babies are happy I wish I’d brought Jen and Fin with me and when the babies scream I’m glad I didn’t.

We hit turbulence early, which puts most of the kids to sleep. It goes away, then comes back, and gets steadily worse for the rest of the flight. By the time we start our descent into LA I feel like I’ve just spent 14 hours on a carnival ride. The Captain says it’s the bumpiest ride he can remember in 30 years of flying. I feel a little pride at being there for the record, also nausea.

I’m nervous at US Customs. I always am, ever since a Customs Officer threatened to bar me from the country in 1999. When I told him I was coming over to do a book tour, he said, “I hear money.” I said, “What?” Again: “I hear money.” He just kept saying it. Eventually I worked out that he didn’t want a bribe but rather thought I was coming here to work—to earn a salary—and I was so relieved I laughed. This was probably a mistake. Because even though I explained quite clearly that nobody pays authors to do bookstore readings, he refused to believe me. Eventually—long after every other passenger had left and it was just me, Jen, and Customs Officers looking like they were just waiting for an excuse to probe something—he said, “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear anything about any book tour.”

Every trip since then it’s been no problem. This time is no exception, although the new US-VISIT program is running, which means I get fingerprinted (left index finger on the pad, sir, now your right), and photographed by a bulbous and somehow evil-looking little webcam. I think this is the first time I’ve ever been fingerprinted. It feels strange. What are they going to do with my fingerprints? Wait until I commit a terrorist atrocity, then make sure I’m not allowed back in? I don’t like that I can think of plenty of things to do with a giant fingerprint database if you’re a government wanting to increase your power, but not many if you just want to prevent terrorism.

It’s 10:30 Tuesday morning. This time today, I was checking in at Melbourne Airport. That’s thanks to the time difference. Yikes. For me, today is 43 hours long.

I catch a cab to my hotel and mess up the tipping. That is, I do the cab driver okay (I think: a little over 15%) but the doorman rushes my bag inside and I don’t tip him straight away because I think he’s going to take it all the way to my room, but then he disappears after depositing it at the check-in counter. Tipping is a nightmare for Australians: we don’t do it at home and don’t know how to do it abroad. It’s a cultural thing: to us, it’s insulting to offer someone such a small amount of money. I know, I know: for many service workers it adds up. But still, when I give someone a tip of a dollar or two I expect them to say, “Well, gee!! Thanks a lot, Mr. Big Spender! Think I’ll buy me a stick of gum!”

First thing I do after check-in is walk down the street and buy a phone card, so I can call home for less than $9 per minute. The second thing I do is call home. It’s 7 a.m., which usually means that Fin is waking up, and luckily her timing today is immaculate. I talk to Jen and then she puts me on speaker. I am informed that Fin is chewing on the phone while I’m talking to her, which I believe because I can hear little slurping sounds. It’s wonderful; I can picture Jen and Fin exactly. For a second I can even smell Finlay. Heaven.

I grab a couple hours sleep, then am woken by a phone that I prove too stupid to answer. There are buttons everywhere, and they all seem to default to “Hang up on caller.” This must be what old people feel like. Eventually I manage to successfully answer a call: it’s Jeff, my media escort, confirming that he’s picking me up at 8:45am tomorrow. Media escorts are people hired by the publisher to drive authors around and make sure they don’t get too lost or frightened. They’re like professional mothers. Jeff says we have an interview to do, then we’ll “hit some bookstores, grab some lunch, mix it up a little, have some fun.” Whoa!

Today is a travel day: I have no other official duties. I go for a walk, buy a T-shirt, eat my first ever Butterfinger bar (not impressed, sad to say), and go over what I want to talk about at my reading tomorrow. For dinner I meet Todd, a guy I started corresponding with way back when Syrup was new. Todd used to tell me horrifying and engrossing stories about his love life and now tells me horrifying and engrossing stories about his attempts to establish himself as a director. It’s a tough call as to which are more frightening. I feel glad to be a writer.

Now it’s 10 p.m. and I’m ready for bed… after just one more phone call, to wish my girls good night.